Thursday, 3 July 2014

How to Win the War

There is no weapon of war that is not
vulnerable to another type of weapon: artillery, while devastating against mass
concentrations of infantry, is vulnerable to attack from the air. Tanks and
armor, which can punch through a front and encircle enemy forces quickly, can
still be destroyed by a single soldier armed with a modern anti-tank weapon.
Aircraft, which can engage a range of targets on the ground and in the air, can
themselves come under fire from enemy fighter aircraft, surface-to-air
missiles, or, again, a single soldier equipped with a portable anti-aircraft
missile system.

Entire armies too have their
vulnerabilities: the German army was unprepared for the Russian climate. The
English at Bannockburn were defeated by their own arrogance and overconfidence,
and the French army was defeated in a few weeks in 1940 by its own decrepit,
incompetent and defeatist generals.

Moreover, all modern armies share a
weakness that will cause their defeat if an enemy can exploit it: they are vulnerable
to the disruption of their logistics and lines of supply. Without a constant
flow of ammunition, food, weapons, equipment and reinforcements, any
conventional fighting force will soon grind to a halt. Even if command and
control – another prime target for disruption by an enemy – are still fully
functional, there is not much a soldier who has no bullets for his gun can do
but surrender, no matter what his orders are, once he is encircled by an enemy
who has an ample supply of ammunition.

Perhaps the most famous example of the
failure to achieve such an encirclement in the history of modern warfare
occurred in June 1940 in northern France and Belgium. The Panzer divisions of
Nazi Germany punched through the allied (at that time Britain and France) lines
in the hilly and forested Ardennes region, which the allies had wrongly thought
impassible to a large armored force, and swept headlong west and then north to
cut off the French and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The allies, who
had expected the Germans to take their traditional invasion route through
Flanders, moved forward, as according to their plans and expectations, to meet a more conventional
and slow moving force (Army Goup B under Colonel-General Fedor von Bock), which
was advancing through the Low Countries and was intended by the Germans to draw the allies forward into a pocket that would
be closed by the Panzer divisions of Army Group A, commanded by Colonel-General
Gerd von Rundstedt, which was already racing around the allies' rear. For a reason that puzzles
historians to this day, Adolf Hitler gave the order (or rather confirmed an
order given by Rundstedt) to halt the advance of his Panzers at this crucial
time (perhaps wanting to give them time to rest and refit before turning south
to attack the heart of France, or perhaps to give Hermann Goering, the head of
the Luftwaffe, the chance of glory in destroying the allied armies from the
air). This gave the British the chance to evacuate the bulk of the BEF (almost
340,000 soldiers) from the port and beaches of Dunkirk, although 35,000 French
who were left behind guarding the British retreat were captured. Had the BEF
been encircled and trapped in France, the British would have faced a disaster,
with no army left from which to rebuild, and Churchill would have been forced
to come to terms with Nazi Germany. If that had happened, the world would be a
very much different place today.

Looking at a map of the present conflict
zone in eastern Ukraine, the rebel forces, as the Allies did in 1940, appear
ripe for encirclement. Rebel-held territory extends like a fat thumb into the
middle of the Donbas in southern Luhansk and northern Donetsk oblasts, with the
base of the thumb being a short stretch of the Ukrainian border with Russia in
the east. It is through this border that the rebels have been supplied, for
several weeks now, with men and matériel – up to and including armored
personnel carriers and even tanks.

The task facing the Ukrainian forces is thus
to push along the border, north from Donetsk and south from Luhansk, to sever
this thumb from the hand that sustains it. Once cut off from their supplies,
the rebel force will start to wither. Ukrainian troops can continue to squeeze
the pocket in which the rebels will have been trapped, forcing them to expend
ammunition and lives, or they can simply wait for the force to collapse in on
itself, and move in to mop up.

It's really that simple. The only conceivable
reason that Ukraine has not yet done this is that it lacked a sufficient number
of men. But Ukrainian forces are now becoming stronger, while the rebels are
weakening. The task of closing the pocket along the border should be given to
the regular army, while the volunteer battalions that have been raised since
the beginning of the hostilities in the east should be given the job of holding
the perimeter around the rebel territory, and perhaps advancing opportunistically
as the rebels withdraw and consolidate (as they inevitably will have to as
their supplies and manpower run low).

There is one important nuance: Ukraine
should also impose a no-fly zone over the rebel-held zone. This might seem
counter-intuitive, given the fact that the Ukrainians have access to air-power
and the rebels do not, (and air-power has already granted a significant advantage
to Ukrainian forces in several engagements), but once encircled the rebels will
only have the option of being supplied by air. If Ukraine declares a no-fly
zone, it will gain a number of other advantages in return. First, its weakened
air forces will be less exposed to attack and losses, and Ukraine will have to
maintain as strong an air force as possible given the threat of a more open
attack by Russia. Second, if the air force is not operating over rebel areas,
it will be harder for the rebels and Russia to claim attacks on civilian areas
are being made by Ukraine from the air (some sort of monitoring of the no-fly
zone, perhaps by the OSCE, will also be required). Third: any flights made by Russian
military aircraft or even civilian helicopters intended to supply the rebels
will be open to attack by Ukraine – if it's in the air, shoot it down.
Ukraine's own forces in the area can be supplied by road and rail rather than
by air.

The last, but perhaps the most important
point is this: to achieve a military victory, the one thing Ukraine must not do
is agree to another ceasefire. That would simply allow the rebels to regroup,
resupply and reinforce. That would be a disastrous mistake, comparable to Rundstedt's
in 1940, which ultimately led to defeat.